Carlton Mellick IIIhttps://carltonmellick.com
author of bizarro fiction
Tue, 06 Nov 2018 19:13:04 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://carltonmellick.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/carlo3.jpg?w=32Carlton Mellick IIIhttps://carltonmellick.com
3232OUT NOW: “The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart”https://carltonmellick.com/2018/11/06/out-now-the-boy-with-the-chainsaw-heart/
https://carltonmellick.com/2018/11/06/out-now-the-boy-with-the-chainsaw-heart/#respondTue, 06 Nov 2018 19:11:56 +0000http://carltonmellick.com/?p=1992My new book, The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart, is now available. After my last couple of books, Stacking Doll and Neverday, I wanted to do something a little more on the action adventure side. Something set in the afterlife. Something that I could really sink myself into and lose myself for days at a time. It’s been a while since I’ve done a story like this, probably not since Ugly Heaven, so it was a really fun setting to explore. I hope you get a chance to check it out.

Mark Knight wakes in the afterlife to discover that he’s been drafted into Hell’s army, forced to fight against the hordes of murderous angels attacking from the North. He finds himself to be both the pilot and the fuel of a demonic war machine known as Lynx, a living demon woman with the ability to mutate into a weaponized battle suit that reflects the unique destructive force of a man’s soul.

While piloting Lynx, Mark adapts quickly to his new life as a soldier and learns that his abilities far surpass those of a normal human recruit. His fighting skills are so great that it could even be a turning point in this war that has not progressed in over five thousand years. But Mark has no interest in winning the war for the kingdom of Hell. All he wants is to see his wife, Amy, once again. As a Christian woman who died tragically in her youth, Mark is positive that she went to Heaven after her death. And if he can fight his way past the angels to reach Heaven’s Gate, Mark believes he’ll be able to rescue Amy from a life of servitude and find a place they can live together for the rest of their post-human lives.

Set in the same universe as Mellick’s bizarro romantic comedy, I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter, The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart illustrates a darker side of the afterlife, one that neither Christian nor Atheist would wish to endure.

]]>https://carltonmellick.com/2018/11/06/out-now-the-boy-with-the-chainsaw-heart/feed/0carltonmellickOUT NOW: “Neverday”https://carltonmellick.com/2018/07/03/out-now-neverday/
https://carltonmellick.com/2018/07/03/out-now-neverday/#commentsWed, 04 Jul 2018 01:18:50 +0000http://carltonmellick.com/?p=1977My new book, NEVERDAY, is now available. This is one that I’ve been talking about for almost a decade now. It’s my version of the time loop trope made popular in the movie “Groundhog Day” but instead of focusing only on a single character this story explores what would happen to society if everyone in the world was trapped in the time loop together, with no chance of ever escaping. Next to my last book, Stacking Doll, this is one of my favorite books I’ve written in recent years. I hope you check it out.

Karl Lybeck has been repeating the same day over and over again, in a constant loop, for what feels like a thousand years. He’s been stuck in this endless cycle for so long that he doesn’t remember what his life was like before time stopped moving forward. He doesn’t remember his parents’ faces or what he used to do for a living. The only reason he remembers his own name is because it’s printed on his Oregon State driver’s license.

When a woman named January enters his life, Karl learns that he isn’t the only one trapped in the time loop. In fact, the majority of the population has been repeating the same day just as he has been for hundreds of years. While Karl was hiding isolated in his suburban home, a whole new world was being built just outside his door. Society has adapted to repeating. Strange laws have been implemented. A new memory-based currency has been put into place.

But there’s something not quite right about the new repeating government. Karl doesn’t understand why those in charge have no interest in trying to fix their situation. He doesn’t doesn’t understand why going into the neverday–that time period that only exists if you stay awake all night to avoid repetition–is considered the worst possible crime that anyone can commit. With the help of others who share in his suspicions, Karl plans to find out exactly what is being hidden from them, even if it destroys the very fabric of their society forever.

Stacking Doll is the story of Benjamin Hammond, a young man who is in love with a Russian nesting doll. But in this world, nesting dolls are not just antique wooden toys. They are a race of people known as Matryoshkans, a subspecies of human who are born with a very peculiar abnormality—they have a collection of smaller people living inside of them.

Benjamin never thought he’d ever fall in love with anyone, let alone a Matryoshkan, but from the moment he met Ynaria he knew she was the only one for him. Although relationships between humans and Matryoshkans are practically unheard of, the two are determined to get married despite objections from their friends and family. After meeting Ynaria’s strict conservative parents, it becomes clear to Benjamin that the only way they will approve of their union is if they undergo The Trial—a matryoshkan wedding tradition where couples lock themselves in a house for several days in order to introduce each other to all of the people living inside of them.

No human has ever gone through The Trial before, so Benjamin has no idea what’s in store for him. He assumes that he’ll love each of Ynaria’s inner selves just as much as he loves her, but as she peels off her layers he realizes that each one is more neurotic and difficult to deal with than the last. And if they’re ever going to be together, Benjamin must fall in love with each and every one of his fiancé’s inner personalities, no matter how strange or disturbing they turn out to be.

Irving Rice has just arrived on the planet Kynaria to film an episode of the popular Travel Channel television series Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern: Intergalactic Edition. Having never left his home state, let alone his home planet, Irving is hit with a severe case of culture shock. He’s not prepared for Kynaria’s mushroom cities, fungus-like citizens, or the giant insect wildlife. And the only human companion he has with him on the voyage is an obnoxious, sex-crazed producer named Mick Meyers, who seems more focused on alien sex tourism than scouting locations for the show.

Irving is taken on a crash course in Kynarian culture, tasting the strange local delicacies to getting drunk off the horrific local brews, until they find themselves ending the night at an alien brothel in the mushroom forests outside of town. Irving is completely resistant to the idea of sleeping with a non-human prostitute until he meets the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen in his life—a nymph-like woman with pink and purple skin, blue plant-like hair, and flowers growing from her head like butterfly antennae. But after a night of passionate lovemaking, Irving finds himself infected by dangerous sexually-transmitted parasites that turn his otherworldly business trip into an agonizing fight for survival.

]]>https://carltonmellick.com/2017/10/17/out-now-parasite-milk/feed/1carltonmellickOUT NOW: The Big Meathttps://carltonmellick.com/2017/07/11/out-now-the-big-meat/
https://carltonmellick.com/2017/07/11/out-now-the-big-meat/#respondTue, 11 Jul 2017 07:33:27 +0000http://carltonmellick.com/?p=1936My newest book, The Big Meat, is now available. This is my tribute to the kaiju genre. I hope you check it out.

The creature was finally dead. After months of fighting it, trying desperately to stop it as it rampaged across the American countryside, turning city after city into a landscape of rubble, we finally managed to beat the damned thing. We actually saved the human species. We survived.

But the corpse still lingers.

In the center of the city once known as Portland, Oregon, there lies a mountain of flesh. Hundreds of thousands of tons of rotting flesh. It has filled the city with disease and dead-lizard stench, contaminated the water supply with its greasy putrid fluids, clogged the air with toxic gasses so thick that you can’t leave your house without the aid of a gas mask. And no one really knows quite what to do about it. A thousand-man demolition crew has been trying to clear it out one piece at a time, but after three months of work they’ve barely made a dent. And then there’s the junkies who have started burrowing into the monster’s guts, searching for a drug produced by its fire glands, setting back the excavation even longer.

It seems like the corpse will never go away. And with the quarantine still in place, we’re not even allowed to leave. We’re stuck in this disgusting rotten hell forever.

The Big Meat is a gut-wrenching, nerve-squirming survival story of loss, addiction, and claustrophobia.

]]>https://carltonmellick.com/2017/07/11/out-now-the-big-meat/feed/0carltonmellickOUT NOW: “Spider Bunny”https://carltonmellick.com/2017/04/03/out-now-spider-bunny/
https://carltonmellick.com/2017/04/03/out-now-spider-bunny/#respondMon, 03 Apr 2017 19:12:26 +0000http://carltonmellick.com/?p=1920My new book, SPIDER BUNNY, is now available. This one is a tribute to the unintentionally terrifying children’s commercials of the ‘70s and ‘80s. I hope you check it out.

Only Petey remembers the Fruit Fun cereal commercials of the 1980s. He remembers how warped and disturbing they were. He remembers the lumpy-shaped cartoon children sitting around a breakfast table, eating puffy pink cereal brought to them by the distortedly animated mascot, Berry Bunny. The characters were creepier than the Sesame Street Humpty Dumpty, freakier than Mr. Noseybonk from the old BBC show Jigsaw. They used to give him nightmares as a child. Nightmares where Berry Bunny would reach out of the television and grab him, pulling him into her cereal bowl to be eaten by the demented cartoon children.

When Petey brings up Fruit Fun to his friends, none of them have any idea what he’s talking about. They’ve never heard of the cereal or seen the commercials before. And they’re not the only ones. Nobody has ever heard of it. There’s not even any information about Fruit Fun on google or wikipedia. At first, Petey thinks he’s going crazy. He wonders if all of those commercials were real or just false memories. But then he starts seeing them again. Berry Bunny appears on his television, promoting Fruit Fun cereal in her squeaky unsettling voice. And the next thing Petey knows, he and his friends are sucked into the cereal commercial and forced to survive in a surreal world populated by cartoon characters made flesh.

There is something wrong with Tori Manetti’s new exercise bike. It is made from flesh and bone. It eats and breathes and poops. It was once a billionaire named Darren Oscarson who underwent years of cosmetic surgery to be transformed into a human exercise bike so that he could live out his deepest sexual fantasy. Now Tori is forced to ride him, use him as a normal piece of exercise equipment, no matter how grotesque his appearance.

Set in a health food dystopia, “Exerice Bike” is an absurd horror tale of domination and submission, power and obedience, desire and desperation.

“A new spin on the post-apocalypse genre. One you won’t soon forget.” –Garrett Cook, author of A God of Hungry Walls

There is a grocery store. The last grocery store in the world. It stands alone in the middle of a vast wasteland that was once our world. The open sign is still illuminated, brightening the black landscape. It can be seen from miles away, even through the poisonous red ash. Every night at the exact same time, the store comes alive. It becomes exactly as it was before the world ended. Its shelves are replenished with fresh food and water. Ghostly shoppers walk the aisles. The scent of freshly baked breads can be smelled from the rust-caked parking lot. For generations, a small community of survivors, hideously mutated from the toxic atmosphere, have survived by collecting goods from the store. But it is not an easy task. Decades ago, before the world was destroyed, there was a terrible thing that happened in this place. A group of armed men in brown paper masks descended on the shopping center, massacring everyone in sight. This horrible event reoccurs every night, in the exact same manner. And the only way the wastelanders can gather enough food for their survival is to traverse the killing spree, memorize the patterns, and pray they can escape the bloodbath in tact.

]]>https://carltonmellick.com/2016/10/07/out-now-the-terrible-thing-that-happens/feed/0carltonmellickterriblethingthathappens15th Anniversary of SATAN BURGERhttps://carltonmellick.com/2016/07/06/15th-anniversary-of-satan-burger/
https://carltonmellick.com/2016/07/06/15th-anniversary-of-satan-burger/#respondWed, 06 Jul 2016 17:23:04 +0000http://carltonmellick.com/?p=185715 years ago, my first novel SATAN BURGER was published. When it came out I really didn’t expect it to do well. I wrote it for fun, just for myself, not expecting anyone would ever even read it. I mean it’s basically just about a group of 20-year-olds who get jobs working at a Satan-themed fast food franchise as the world is ending. It’s not exactly the most commercial concept. Yet for some utterly strange reason that I still can’t even slightly comprehend the book did well. Really well. It actually found an audience big enough to launch my career. A year or so after its release I was able to quit my job and write full time which was something I never thought possible, especially not at such a young age (I was barely old enough to buy beer at the time). 15 years and 50 books later, I’m still here, still writing, and it’s all thanks to this book. I pretty much owe everything to Satan Burger and the fans who supported it over the years.

The 15th Anniversary Edition of SATAN BURGER is now available at amazon. It’s got an introduction by one of my heroes, John Skipp, who was a major influence on me when I was a teenager (and still is today). It’s also got illustrations by Ryan Ward, an underground artist who sent me fan art for the book years ago that I loved so much that I asked him to illustrate the whole book. And there’s also a new forward that I’ve written detailing the history of the book over the past 15 years.

If you haven’t read the book before or you want to get a more collectible edition, check out the anniversary edition at amazon.com

When Satan Burger was first being passed around among teenage punks and fans of weird art and film, there was nothing else like it. A book of rebellious spirit that simplistically captured the postmodern malaise of a culture obsessed with consumerism. It quickly gained an underground following, was transcribed by fans and bootlegged online, was translated into Russian and made its way around the world attracting the attention of readers bored with typical mainstream fare. Combining a satirical wit and style on par with legendary humorists such as Kurt Vonnegut and Russell Edson with the crazy punk ethos of cult film directors such as Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Takashi Miike, this was a book overflowing with so many new ideas and absurd philosophies that it not only launched the career of underground author Carlton Mellick III, but inspired an entire literary movement.

For the fifteenth anniversary of the release of this Bizarro Fiction classic, Eraserhead Press is thrilled to present this special hardcover edition, featuring an introduction by splatterpunk legend John Skipp, illustrations by Ryan Ward, and a new preface by the author.

Satan Burger explores a new kind of apocalypse. Not an apocalypse caused by disease or nuclear war, but an apocalypse of boredom. A plague of monotony has spread across the countryside, sucking all passion and inspiration out of everyone over the age of twenty-five, leaving only the disenfranchised youth to fend for themselves in a world crumbling around them. Featuring a narrator who sees his body from a third-person perspective, a man whose flesh is dead but his body parts are alive and running amok, an overweight messiah, the personal life of the Grim Reaper, a race of women who feed on male orgasms, and a motley group of squatter punks that team up with the devil to find their place in a world that doesn’t want them anymore.

Ethan is in love with the weird girl in school. The one with the twitchy eyes and spiders in her hair. The one who can’t sit still for even a minute and speaks in an odd squeaky voice. The one they call Spiderweb.

Although she scares all the other kids in school, Ethan thinks Spiderweb is the cutest, sweetest, most perfect girl in the world. But there’s a problem. Whenever they go on a date at the Dairy Queen, her whole fucking face explodes. He’s not sure why it happens. She just gets so excited that pressure builds under her skin. Then her face bursts, spraying meat and gore across the room, her eyeballs and lips landing in his strawberry sundae.

At first, Ethan believes he can deal with his girlfriend’s face-exploding condition. But the more he gets to know her, the weirder her condition turns out to be. And as their relationship gets serious, Ethan realizes that the only way to make it work is to become just as strange as she is.